Nietzsche e il teatro della filosofia by Salvatore Natoli (review)

Salvatore Natoli’s monograph, Nietzsche e il teatro della filosofia (Nietzsche and the Theatre of Philosophy), is part of a rich Italian tradition of Nietzsche studies that has developed over the past forty years. It has developed in two main directions: the first, of a hermeneutic orientation, has its best-known representative in Gianni Vattimo; the second, of a historical orientation, continues the work on the critical edition of Friedrich Nietzsche’s writings begun by Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari. Natoli’s approach falls fully under the hermeneutic orientation.

As Natoli rightly points out, after dealing with Nietzsche extensively during the twentieth century, philosophers have recently had less to say about him. The causes of this are not too mysterious: Nietzsche’s philosophy is deeply tied to a century—the twentieth century—which anticipated torments, tensions, and abysses. If it is therefore unsurprising that contemporary philosophers have somewhat distanced themselves from Nietzsche, aside from the historical or hermeneutical perspective, Natoli’s project is otherwise perfectly understandable and very specific: to make explicit, through Nietzsche’s philosophy, the link between “hermeneutics” and “genealogy” (19), two concepts typical of the twentieth century.

If it is clear what Nietzsche (and Natoli) mean by genealogy, it is more difficult to outline the relationships between hermeneutics and the complexity of Nietzsche’s thought. As is known, genealogy is a particular disposition of philosophical inquiry that Nietzsche uses in many works, while hermeneutics is a philosophical orientation that, in its different twentieth-century formulations, refers to some of Nietzsche’s arguments, especially about the issue of truth. Specifically, Natoli makes a strong interpretive claim in considering hermeneutics as a position in some way equivalent to Nietzschean perspectivism: he claims that “the perspective is a pointed look, a cut that opens up dimensions” (15, my translations throughout), while genealogy means going back to the root, to the origin and, as such, “it investigates the implant and the unfolding of various processes” (15). In this context, Natoli proceeds in a Heideggerian spirit, stating that “hermeneutics, then, even before being a method, is a condition of existence: it coincides with the inevitable stance that follows our being placed. It does not depend on a decision but, if anything, it motivates the decisions we make and of which we do not always know the how and why” (15).

In practice, therefore, hermeneutics is not a method, nor is it a philosophical orientation, but looks more like an acknowledgment, like the manifestation of the awareness of the “openness” in which we find ourselves, to paraphrase Heidegger in Being and Time. Therefore, it coincides with the awareness of the perspectival limit that characterizes our views of the world and, consequently, insists on acknowledging our inability to grasp the truth. It is a limit that, in Heidegger’s hermeneutics, is considered constitutive of epistemology and its heuristic possibilities.

In this sense, then, philosophy can only be “theater”—that is, the staging of worldviews, all of which are equally legitimate. Exploring this was certainly one of Nietzsche’s temptations, grasped and expressed with interpretive fineness by hermeneutical readings of the kind that inspire Natoli. Addressing Nietzschean philosophy, hermeneutic philosophy—especially as developed by Martin Heidegger, Hans Georg Gadamer, and Gianni Vattimo—generally adopts a twofold theoretical approach. First, it argues that Nietzsche does not affirm any theory of truth, but rather expresses entirely relativist positions (this would be the sense of the equivalence of all perspectives mentioned above). Second, it engages in interpretive work intended to weaken the arguments and theses—such as that of the will to power—which appear to have nothing perspectival about them, at least not in the radical sense. The “other” Nietzsche, or the positive philosophy that Nietzsche expresses in the metaphysical, ontological, cosmological, and anthropological fields, is largely overlooked or otherwise declared contradictory and inconsistent with the critical and deconstructive side of his thought.

This is precisely the spirit with which Natoli addresses the issue of the “will to power,” the theoretical center of...